Time to Regulate Dog Daycare Facilities

At what point will municipalities be galvanized to action and implement requirements for the operation of dog care facilities? How many dogs must die due to poorly designed facilities, ignorant and untrained staff and flat out lousy business operations?

To be clear - I am not a huge government regulation gal. I'm more than happy to have government stay out of my home and the like. That said, we are talking about living creatures here, and just as there are deeply strict regulations around facilities that care for people's children, so too there should be for pets.

Yes, I am comparing the lives of people's pets to people's children. If you have a problem with that, you're probably reading the wrong blog.

Over the last month, there is a facility in Tampa, FL that has lost not one but TWO dogs. Yes. Two dogs have died in the care of a facility and at the writing of this post that facility was still in operation.

That confounds me.

There are so many things wrong with the story - that the facility has a structured "time" at which dogs are brought inside rather than paying attention to the weather conditions and the state of the dogs to insure that they are modifying the schedule as necessary. That their handler to dog ratio appears to be something north of 40-50 dogs PER HANDLER. That the staff is clearly so poorly prepared and improperly trained that they completely missed any early signs that a dog was in distress.

If this were my facility every single person who was on shift at the time of the death would be fired. Full stop. If that meant shutting down until I restaffed, so be it.